Massimo Bartolini

Fountain

An absurd object projects from the wall in the middle of Karriere Bar. Its articulation in bent steel sheeting recalls some sort of functional installation in an industrial kitchen. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Instead of flowing out of the tap and down into the drain, the water spurts up from the drain, striking the tap. Items don’t come much more anti-utilitarian than this – a fountain, indeed one of perfumed water, diffusing a faint fragrance. The fixture that represents the height of decadence and superfluity is taken a step further in a celebration of sensuous delight in abstract form, movement, sound, and even aroma, for no other purpose than to provide an agreeable experience and pleasant ambience. Another word for absurd is baroque. The Italian artist Massimo Bartolini works with experiences that are rooted in the Baroque and as such venerable, and yet also de nos jours. It was in the seventeenth century Baroque period that many of today’s scientific disciplines took form, albeit in conjunction with a wholly modern sense of the irrational and the relative. Baroque architecture, which was the most technically advanced that the world had ever seen, consisted of columns that bore no load and steps that led nowhere. It was a paraphrased reality, not unlike that which we today call virtual reality. Both of these realities seem to be palimpsests of representation upon representation upon representation, and at the heart of this conception – or lack of the same – is the fountain, which, making no claims, eludes the problem entirely. It simply is. (NH)

Massimo Bartolini, born 1962, Italy

• artwork